The $100,000 repair that was really a $9,000 beam and a leaking dishwasher A contractor quoted us $100,000 to replace the subfloor and every joist in the building. I hung up the phone and said, "A hundred thousand dollars?" I think the color drained from my face. Some of that number was the repair. A lot of it was access. The crawl space was tight, low, and miserable to move through, and that alone drives up labor on a job like this. He'd also seen staining across a run of joists, and he priced it the way you price a job when you're pretty sure the owner isn't going to crawl under there and check for himself. Our maintenance supervisor had already been down there. He'd seen some of the damage himself. But he's not a construction guy, so it's not like he could tell a rotted beam from a stained one. Turned out the real problem was a dishwasher in one unit that had been leaking, probably for months. We fixed it Then I put on some overalls, grabbed a camera and a flashlight, and crawled under the building myself to see what the leak had actually done to the wood. One beam was bad enough to replace. A few others needed repair, not replacement. The fix came in around $9,000. I'm not an engineer. I just had a flashlight and a strong aversion to lighting $89,000 on fire. Most contractors aren't trying to rip anybody off. But look at how the call usually goes. Something breaks. The property manager calls somebody. They are not construction expert. The contractor shows up with every incentive to diagnose it right and every incentive to scope it as big as it can reasonably go. If the person paying doesn't know enough to push back, the scope just grows. That's not one bad contractor. That's what happens on any deal where one side knows more than the other, and the buyer never checks. My job is to trace the actual cause, then solve it for a number that makes sense for the property. Those are two different assignments. Owners pay a lot of stupid tax when they treat an expert's scope as settled fact instead of the start of an investigation. Before you sign off on a six-figure repair, go look at it yourself. Or send somebody who knows how to look, and knows what they're looking for. The cheapest tool I own isn't in my toolbox. It's a flashlight, common sense, and asking enough questions to be annoying.